Last month I recounted the terrible customer service experience I had after finding corrupt files on my Xdrive. Thirty-six days and roughly 125 hits from inside AOL/TW later, I received a mail from a director at Xdrive. Darin gave, all things considered, a great update on how Xdrive is working to improve their service after I sent a few suggestions. In recognition of the effort that Xdrive and AOL made, below is the email thread in its (near) entirety.
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From: Ohlandt, Darin
Sent: Tuesday, March 04, 2008 9:00 AM
To: Jeff Maurone
Subject: Your postings on Xdrive
Dear Mr. Maurone,
My name is Darin Ohlandt and I am the Director of Xdrive's online storage services at AOL. At you convenience, can you please contact me on [redacted]? I would like to discuss your experience with Xdrive and our customer support team in order to understand things more fully in the hopes of improving them. I'd also like to get more information on the files you reference so that we can try to resolve your issue if at all possible.
Thank you and best regards,
Darin Ohlandt
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From: Jeff Maurone
Sent: Monday, March 17, 2008 8:20 PM
To: Ohlandt, Darin
Subject: RE: Your postings on Xdrive
Hi Darin,
Thanks for getting in touch. Below I’ve put together a few points I’d like to enumerate via email. Hopefully they prove helpful in your efforts to advance and improve Xdrive.
Incidentally, I felt like I pushed as hard as I could to get my issue resolved using the standard channels and got nowhere. I turned to my journalistic tendencies and published that piece. The few suggestions below, I hope, can avoid this happening in the future.
Provide structured ways for users to restore files
I think one of the key selling points for users of Xdrive is being able to rest assured that their files are intact and if anything happens to them, Xdrive has nice backup systems maintaining versions of these files. Hopefully that’s the reality in the backend. I know that if I come across an instance where I file I have authored become corrupt, I instantly freak and turn to places where I could potentially have this archived. Having a feature on the Xdrive where I can specify a file on my Xdrive and a date for the version I need and then receiving an email within five working days could really make some folks more confident of backups (using myself as a archetype user).
Provide confirmation for uploaded files
This is a standard feature request as well. I suspect much of the corruption that occurred to my files was resultant of problems during upload. Having some type of confirmation after uploading to assure me that my files made it intact would be immensely reassuring.
Fix customer service
You’ve seen my thread with customer service. Hopefully you see that it’s all but unintelligible. I absolutely understand the organizational pressures at AOL that force you to leverage their extensive support system to maximize the way you leverage the AOL assets. But sometimes the regression in quality is so significant that, frankly, it just sucks for users. Customer service in this situation would be personal email addresses to reps accountable for resolving individual user issues with real proactive amounts of communication on the part of AOL/Xdrive.
Fix public relations
I wrote my “Do not use Xdrive.com” post on January 28th but didn’t receive your email until thirty-six days later on March 4th. In the interim, I received what I estimate to be 125-150 hits from *users within AOL or AOLTW domains*. A PR team tasked with monitoring instances of Xdrive appearing in blogs and the press would immediately know about situations like these where brand perception is at risk and respond quickly and appropriately. As a point of reference, I have received quite a few more requests from users searching for “xdrive corrupt files” or “using xdrive” or “missing files xdrive.” Finally, configuring monitors for activity like this is quite straightforward.
Feel free to respond with additional questions; I put effort into this because I believe in the relevance and future of online storage. I do appreciate the gesture toward recovering my files, though at this point I’ve gone through the legwork to rewrite them.
Thanks.
Jeff
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From: Ohlandt, Darin
Sent: Monday, March 17, 2008 6:43 PM
To: Jeff Maurone
Subject: RE: Your postings on Xdrive
Jeff,
Thank you very much for your comments. They are very much appreciated and will certainly help us to improve the level of service -- across all facets -- that we provide for Xdrive.
I totally understand your frustrations, especially with respect to customer service. It took me a few days to get back to you so that I could do some research and get an understanding regarding some specifics as to what was going on.
If you'll allow me, let me please brief you on some of the changes we are making to our service to better help our customers, including you. I do consider you to be our archetypical customer so we should model our processes after the types of concerns customers like you have with the service.
We are in the process of completely redoing our customer service. We have brought in additional resources to specifically provide expert level technical and operations support and have set up a new e-mail address that goes directly to this tier of support: XdriveHelpLine@aol.com. We are revamping our processes to get information and problems to this tier more quickly and efficiently so that they can help users who don't have standard questions (billing, logging in, product information) and can get their issues resolved more quickly.
Within the Xdrive Desktop Client software, you can define multiple back-up sets so that you yourself can have multiple versions of your data resident on Xdrive. You can then select "restore" for any single back-up set to move these copies back to your hard drive. That said, we are developing mechanisms to make this more apparent to our users and are working on better mechanisms for general restore capabilities.
May I ask if you were using the Desktop Client software or the Web version of Xdrive? As you may see from our changes to our home page and within certain areas of the application, we have embarked on a program to complete update and renew Xdrive. This started with the introduction of our new Xdrive Desktop Lite software, which uses the new Adobe AIR runtime environment and flex (currently in beta). We will extend this to our web interface and also update our client software as well. Your comments and suggestions are very helpful as we continue down this path.
I appreciate your honesty and forthrightness in explaining your situation. I am happy that your posted your blog since it has enabled us to (1) engage in a dialogue with you as one of our protoptypical customers and (2) work to improve our levels of support. I am disappointed that our customer service team could not help you more readily, but (as I pointed out) we are actively engaged in improving the customer service that we provide to our users. It certainly should not have come to this, but I hope that we can learn from this experience and formulate better products and procedures to help you, our customer.
Sincerely,
Darin
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From: Jeff Maurone
Sent: Friday, March 21, 2008 11:25 AM
To: 'Ohlandt, Darin'
Subject: RE: Your postings on Xdrive
Hi Darin,
Thanks for the response. It seems that the efforts you’re taking are significant; hopefully they all prove to be fruitful in terms of user satisfaction. In recognition of the efforts you took to reach out to me, I’ll be sure to post this thread to my blog and link to it from my original post.
[Redacted] If there’s anything you need from me in terms of reviewing future software or whatnot, feel free to get in touch.
Thanks.
Jeff
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From: Ohlandt, Darin
Sent: Monday, March 24, 2008 1:40 PM
To: Jeff Maurone
Subject: RE: Your postings on Xdrive
Jeff,
Thank you very much for your feedback. My goal is to make sure that we incorporate this feedback into improving our Xdrive service from inital product registration to user experience all the way through to customer support. I hope that you will continue to use and experiment with Xdrive -- I would love to hear what you think about the product as we implement various changes over the coming months.
[Redacted]
Thanks,
Darin
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